


It's a Process

by fraternite



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Anxiety, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Let's put some realism in our healing magic, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25871782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: “I’m not--” he stops, shakes his head, tries to find his words.  He can’t catch his breath.  “I am fine.  Caduceus healed me.  It is all finished.”___Healing magic is great, but it doesn't solve *every* problem.
Relationships: The Mighty Nein & Caleb Widogast
Comments: 10
Kudos: 206





	It's a Process

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [make sure you kiss your knuckles](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25653379) by [SongOfWizardry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SongOfWizardry/pseuds/SongOfWizardry). 



The process of collecting themselves after a fight has become gruesomely automatic by now, as if checking that everyone is alive and has all their limbs attached is a normal part of a day. Caleb mentally counts companions, letting the battle-tension in the back of his neck relax with each head he tags as alive and well:  _ Eins. Zwei. Drei. Vier. Fünf. Und . . . und . . . _

A cold sweat washes over him and he looks frantically around, his vision spinning as he whips his head back and forth. Who is missing?

A minute later, he sees her: It’s Nott. She’s down, but not  _ down-- _ not dead, maybe not gravely injured, just tangled up in a thornbush. (Belatedly, his memory fills in the gaps: An attempted run-and-leap off a tree trunk after Beau had pulled off what she would call some “exceptionally cool monk shit”; the skitter of claws slipping on wet wood; a wild squawk and the crackle of snapping twigs as Nott crashed into the underbrush.)  _ Sechs, _ he finishes, dizzy with relief, and stumbles over to help her up.

“Are you all right, Nott?” He reaches out his left hand to pull her up from the berry bush snatching at her clothes and tangled dark hair.

Nott’s eyes go wide. “Caleb! Caduceus, come quick!”

“What, are you hurt?” When she doesn’t take his hand, he crouches over her, looking for the injury he’d missed. He rummages in his pockets, awkwardly fumbling with the inner ones on the left (hard to reach with the same-side hand), trying to find the healing potion Nott makes him carry, in case a cleric doesn’t get there fast enough.

Nott leaps out of the bush unaided and runs toward the center of the clearing. Caleb abandons the search for the potion and stumbles after, heart clenched with worry. At the same time his brain is spinning, trying to recall Nott taking a hit in the fight; he doesn’t remember that happening. Why doesn’t he remember?

A moment later, Nott is running back to him, dragging Caduceus by the hand, and he wants to tell her to stop running around, if she’s hurt she should be resting, but something in Caduceus’s face pushes the words out of his head.

“Okay,” Caduceus says, voice a calm drawl like always, even if his eyes say something else. “Let’s take care of this. Mister Caleb, wouldn’t you like to sit down?”

Caleb frowns. “What? I--no, there’s nothing--why--”

Then his eyes follow Caduceus’s to his right arm and his stomach drops into his boots.

There’s a chunk of metal--ugly, pitted with rust--through his arm. A rough wedge about the size of his hand, it has torn through his coat just below his shoulder; he just can see the tip projecting out the back of his sleeve. The coat is drenched with blood, and more is running down his limp fingers, dripping onto the trampled ground. The arm itself is hanging loose like a dead body, like it belongs to someone else or to nobody. And his hand isn’t (Caleb’s stomach clenches as he realizes it) facing the way it’s supposed to be.

“Oh.” Caleb’s ears start buzzing--or was that sound there all along?--and he takes another stumbling step, not sure where he’s going. “Oh.”

“That’s right,” Caduceus says, approving, and Caleb realizes that his knees have already folded and he’s being lowered carefully to sit on the ground.

“It’s okay, Caleb,” Nott is chattering, crouching in front of him so she can look into his eyes. “Caduceus is going to get you all fixed up. Just wait a minute.”

“I’m okay, Nott,” Caleb says, patting vaguely towards her head. “It doesn’t hurt.”

As soon as he says this, it stops being true, as if his words had unlocked something. The pain starts like a burn, low and steady, but growing, growing until his whole right side is alight with it. His breath stutters between his teeth and he misses some conversation.

“Are you ready?” Caduceus is asking him.

“For--for what?” His tongue is thick and stupid in his mouth and he’s not quite sure that he isn’t speaking Zemnian.

“We’re going to help you lie down, okay?” Jester tells him--and oh, Jester is there now too?--placing one hand behind his neck, as if he were a newborn infant. “We need to pull out that piece of metal in order to heal you, and it’s . . . well, it’ll just be easier if you’re lying down, you know?”

He nods and they lever him down to the ground (and  _ oh _ , that jostles his broken arm and that is not good at all) and Nott settles herself right by his head, picking up his good hand, the left arm he’d almost forgotten about in his overwhelming awareness of the right.

“You can squeeze as hard as you need,” she murmurs, patting the back of his. “Don’t worry, it’ll be quick.”

Caleb is about to say something--to thank her? to assure her he is not worried?--but just then Jester touches the shard of metal and for a moment there is nothing but white-hot pain, fire shooting down every nerve in his body, his vision going black with it, and  _ gods _ , he can feel the edges of the broken bone grinding against each other inside his arm, and it’s only eight seconds but it lasts for years.

At the end of it, he is panting, his throat raw and the fingers of his left hand cramped around Nott’s tiny one, as the icy heat of a healing spell runs outward from the gash in his arm, melting away the lingering aches. He shuts his eyes for a moment and takes a few shaky breaths as the magic finishes its work. Then he lets Nott’s hand go and pushes himself up to a seat, hesitantly twitching the fingers of his right hand. It moves without trouble, and there is no pain (just the faintest echoing ache where his brain still thinks there should be a gaping wound and a snapped bone).

“Ah,” he says, shakily. “Thank you. That is--that is better.” He stands, and finds Jester at his elbow, needlessly propping him up.

“Let’s go sit down by the cart,” she suggests. “We’re going to stop for a rest here, I think--since we’re stopped anyway, and all, and Beau found some weird shit in those guys’ pockets that she wants to check out.”

“I can cast Identify,” he offers, looking around for Beau, but Jester pulls him onward.

“Maybe not right now. Let’s just go sit down, okay?”

“Wh--Jester, did you get hurt?”

“What, me? No, I’m fine,” she assures him. Gently, she shoves him to the ground next to the cart, where he can lean back against a wheel, and flops down next to him. “They barely even touched me.”

Beau ambles up to them, a bundle of cloth in her hands. But instead of the unidentified plunder Caleb expects, when she shakes it out it’s just one of their blankets, heavy gray wool with dark red stripes, and she drapes it over Caleb’s shoulders.

“Uh.” Caleb falters. “Why?”

She raises one eyebrow. “Dude, you’re shivering?”

“It’s not cold,” Caleb protests, but then he notices how the words are clipped and stuttered between chattering teeth. He looks down at his hands. They’re trembling, his fingers fumbling as he tries to grab onto the edge of the blanket. His right hand is still streaked with drying blood. “It’s not cold,” he says again.

Jester pats his shoulder for some reason. “It’s okay, Caleb. You’re gonna be fine.”

“I’m not--” he stops, shakes his head, tries to find his words. He can’t catch his breath. “I  _ am _ fine. Caduceus healed me. It is all finished.” 

He holds up his right arm to show her, but he can’t hold it steady. He stares at his hand--the skin ashen-white under the blood, the fingernails tinged with blue--as it trembles like a leaf. He can’t make a solid fist. “But he--”

“You’ve probably got a touch of shock,” Caduceus rumbles, climbing down from the cart with his tea caddy. “When you get hurt, your body produces a lot of chemicals, trying to keep you up on your feet. Even if we heal the wounds, the chemicals are still there in your blood; they’re trying to help, but things can get mixed up. It would take a different spell to remove those effects, and that  _ is _ something we could do, but then the absence of those chemicals can lead to  _ other _ complications, and in the end I usually feel it’s better to let the process run the course, if no one’s in danger.”

Caleb stares at him blankly. He should get this--he’s  _ smart _ \--but although he understood each of the words individually, they refuse to come together into meaning in his brain. “I don’t . . .”

“You’re crashing,” Beau fills in. “It’s normal. Do what we tell you and you’ll be fine in an hour or two.”

“Trust your body,” Caduceus adds. “This is something it does naturally; it’s very good at it.”

Caleb, still not comprehending what’s going on, tries to let go of that part of his brain that always needs to grasp everything, to control the situation. Caduceus and Beau understand, and probably Jester too--maybe everyone who wasn’t just half passed-out on the ground gets it--and he trusts them to have his back. He trusts them. 

“Ja, okay,” he says. Jester beams and pats his shoulder through the blanket. 

“Tea will be ready soon,” Caduceus promises. “I think we could all use something warm.”

If you’d asked Caleb, twenty years back, how he imagined his future as a mage, he’d have spun some dream of billowing robes, of grand halls filled with ancient tomes, of shaping reality itself with a single word of power. He’d never, not in a million years, have pictured himself a scruffy, skinny man in a dirty coat, propped up against a wagon at the side of a muddy road. He wouldn’t have imagined a group of foreigners and outcasts wrapping him in blankets in the middle of the day and fussing over him with tea. 

The Caleb that was would’ve been horrified at the image. But somehow, this messy, mundane reality isn’t so bad.

Eyes shut, he leans his head back against the cart and waits for teatime.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so the "inspired by" work is "make sure you kiss your knuckles" by SongOfWizardry, and it's not like directly connected in any way, but the *spirit* of that fic is what made me want to write this one, so I wanted to give credit to it and also recommend you go read it if you haven't yet.


End file.
